Tuesday, 22 November 2011

Triumphans, exultans

I mentioned earlier that our little department in our big university, the Little CHEF (Centre for Hammering English into Foreigners) was threatened with becoming a joint venture with the property speculator known as UpYours University Partnerships, an Education-for-Certain-People's-Profit organisation that would take over the running of our English language programmes and foundation courses whilst reducing rates of pay, increasing workloads, denying teachers union rights and not paying into the teachers' pension scheme. They would have to hire underqualified and under-experienced staff who'd be prepared to work for about a tenner an hour. In addition to this, they would go for bums on seats by hyping the 'product', promising success, and accepting onto the programmes kids who really ought not to be on them, alongside other kids who deserve not to be held back by huge classes of very mixed level and teachers who are not always up to the task. They would then be forced to assess these kids over-generously at the end of the courses, lest the product be revealed as a pig in a poke; if you make promises in exchange for money and fail to deliver, people tell their mates and you are totally screwed. Why risk that, when you can introduce your own assessment system in which everyone's a winner?

All that aside, I'm sure they have everyone's best interests at heart.

However, let joy be unconfined, for UpYours was defeatedbei uns just as they were at Essex, Oxford Brookes, Reading, Goldsmith's College and Westminster University. An hour ago I got this e-mail:

Thanks to strong resistance from Little CHEF staff, and thanks to the excellent backing from the UCU union at branch, regional and national level, together we've managed to see off the UpYours privateers. Additionally, we've given a firm message to the likes of Professor Grabbie and Dr Slymebagge-Hogg that if they wish to muck about with us again, then it will be at their peril.

While management will undoubtedly claim that their reversal over UpYours was purely a business decision that had nothing to do with the activities of UCU members here,* make no mistake, if we had not stood up and fought them over this, then the UpYours deal would have gone through and we'd soon be working for the educational version of Macdonalds, with those teachers intending to come back for courses later in the year being offered less than half the pay rate and much worse terms and conditions. So well done to everyone for sticking together!

This is a huge relief at a time when huge reliefs are rare as teddy-bear turds. I suspect there will be celebratory post-lesson drinkies in the Little CHEF tomorrow, for Christmas has come early. Note to our regular burglars: if you are planning to abstract another monitor from our classrooms (there are still seven up for grabs, as no doubt you know) I suggest you make burgling time a tad later than usual tomorrow evening, OK?

*****

* The claim made by the same crew after the serious butt-kicking administered by UCU and staff at Essex University in 2008: 'it was felt in the end that the joint venture was not appropriate in that context'. Too bloody right it wasn't.

*****

From the union today, 26th November, emphasis triumphantly added:

In case you haven't seen already the news on UCU's website, 90% of the voters in our poll have said that a partnership with INTO* would damage the university's reputation. The Branch Committee would like to thank everyone who took part in our online poll.INTO has now been rejected by staff at every UK university that has been polled on whether or not their institution should get involved with the company.

9 comments:

Most excellent! A little bit of good news sparking up the terminal cynicism that is now colouring my life, is always a good thing - especially when it falls to them as are worthy of it and, even more so, to those who have chosen to spend their lives in our somewhat benighted profession. There are many things today that seem unstoppable and relentlessly heartless, any attempt at voicing an objection or even an opinion sometimes feels like head- banging on the most obdurate of walls. But for this indeed, I salute you and all concerned. Enjoy the pre-Christmas wassail.

Thank ye both. This has been a lesson to me in the sheer fucking sliminess of those in management who stood to gain from everyone else's loss, who swore their subordinates in HR to secrecy, who called the first meeting with our teachers when they had pretty much made the whole thing a done deal, who tactically sent into the department a bunch of suits and photographers to stride purposefully about saying: 'well, we could have these rooms here, couldn't we?', all this a stunt just to make it appear that this was all going through above our heads and we might as well lie down and take it. Arseholes. Well, we didn't! Am chuffed to bits.

Wicked- as they say in sub-cultures from which I am excluded. I am so sick of accountants and management and fucking consultants and smug- up-themselves- business execs who just weasel their way in everywhere and destroy the good, the clean and the real. Bastards. Keep on trucking, VS.

'The sheer fucking sliminess of those in management' does not (alas) come as a surprise. But as we live in the times (how did this happen?) when education revolves around profit, thinking outside the box is not the agenda and compromising standards is status quo, this is a wonderful piece of news. Congratulations! This has restored my faith -- clearly voicing your dissent can after all make a difference. Very impressed!

It took a leafleting campaign, an approach to local MPs and an open letter from the union to the two chief conspirators to wake up the board of governors, who would otherwise have thought, well, Professor Slymebagge and Dr. Greedie-Kunt no doubt know what they're doing, let them get on with it, eh? Slymebagge and Greedie-Kunt will no doubt be moving on to another university in due course to attempt to pull the same stunt.

As I've semi-discreetly weighed in earlier about this takeover, VS, may I congratulate you and your mates for such solidarity. The "market-funded" (the bandied-about euphemism replacing "for-profit") sector's spread throughout higher ed's a global trend in this bottom-line era, when every part of what we try to teach and learn translates as stats and speadsheets. We find "success" may be measured by how our "customers" are pleased by us. I'm glad at least Over There you've resisted this trend.

@Fionnchu, yes, allowing the customers to evaluate our success or otherwise in education is pretty scary. I think we are already generous enough as it is, so it is heartening to know we won't be forced to sell out completely.

'UpYours' (aka INTO University Partnerships) have not been very successful - they are making big losses and their overtures to several universities have been rejected in the last five years or so - we are the latest and I hope not the last.

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Quite.

''Oh, don't the days seem lank and long,When all goes right and nothing goes wrong.And isn't your life extremely flat,With nothing whatever to grumble at.''

W. S. Gilbert

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"Nothing optional - from homosexuality to adultery - is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate."

Christopher Hitchens

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Brendan Behan

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Richard P. Feynman

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Jonathan Rauch

''One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.''

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

''The human species, Dinah sometimes thinks, is stark staring mad. People have no sooner got themselves born than they start to imagine the gods want them to flatten their heads, or perforate their genitals, or arrange themselves into hierarchies based on the colour of their skins. The gods require them to avoid eating hoofs, or to walk backwards in certain sacred presences, or to hang up cats in clay pots and light fires underneath them. The gods like them to slaughter birds and make incisions in their own skulls. The gods have put the banana on this earth so that the human species can apprehend that fruit as a miraculous revelation of the Holy Trinity. It has to do with their singular ability to think and dream in symbols. This is what makes the species so vicious. It's also what makes them great poets.''

Barbara Trapido'Frankie and Stankie'.

On God

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on trying not to be an arse

On Buddhist meditation:

'Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether.'